Thursday, December 03, 2009

December CommQuote

David Hockney has a new passion, drawing on his iPhone, as Lawrence Weschler describes in a recent New York Review of Books piece. The application called Brushes, which enables users to digitally draw or fingerpaint on the device's screen, provides a full color wheel spectrum that can be easily lightened or darkened. Hockney has gone wild with this new technology producing thousands of images which he casually sends to friends. So far he's been working in three thematic areas--portraits and self-portraits, still life of plants and flowers, and California dawns. Most iPhone painters use their index finger but Hockney is strictly a thumb-man. He has no problem with his images finding their way into print media but believes it's worth noting that:

"...the images always look better on the screen than on the page. After all, this is a medium of pure light, not ink or pigment, if anything more akin to a stained glass window than an illustration on paper. It's all part of the urge toward figuration. You look out at the world and you're called to make gestures in response. And that's a primordial calling: goes all the way back to the cave painters. May even have preceded language. People are always asking me about my ancestors, and I say, Well there must have been a cave painter back there somewhere. Him scratching away on his cave wall, me dragging my thumb over this iPhone's screen. All part of the same passion." --"David Hockney's iPhone Passion," Lawrence Weschler, The New York Review of Books, October 22